Your Daily Amanda Palmer Outrage

Yup! AGAIN! You guys, I KNOWWWWW.

And it’s weird to have these deep feelings — one way or the other — about celebrities. Like, DEEPLY weird. If there were ever a person on the Internet who wrote as long and as intensely and as occasionally unfairly as I have written about young Amanda Palmer of the Boston Pretending To Be Statues Palmers, I would find that person’s house, and that person and I, well, we would DISCUSS.

But this is a problem. Because basically, I know you’re reaching for “outrageous,” Amanda, and I know that you’re like, “could anything be more outrageous than a group that is responsible for lots of domestic terrorism and also killing folks of color and/or contributing to a cultural context in which folks of color can easily be killed, for funsies? Nope, probably not. SOLID TWEET THERE, AMANDA. GOOD JOB.” But, like, you really have to be careful, especially when so many people are listening to you and framing you as some sort of “feminist” “role” “model” because there’s a thin line between making a cutting and insightful comment which relies on using offensive language, often to point out the offensiveness of the language itself, and just like BEING OFFENSIVE and trivializing things that ARE ACTUALLY IMPORTANT, and it’s a lot easier to cross that line when you’re not really FUNNY at all, and like maybe you need to recognize that you’re neither funny nor informed enough to easily zzzzzzzzzzzzz…

Oh, huh, what? Right. Amanda Palmer. Being a fool in the public square. Again.

This was written by Sady. Posted on Thursday, March 25, 2010, at 6:14 pm. Filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

I’m going to echo Gayle’s comment and say that I too have gone from really liking her a lot (even though I’m not a big fan of her music, I was a fan of her persona), to rather disliking her.

But I have to say I don’t think there’s anything weird about having strong feelings about celebrities. They’re not close to us but celebrities are people who are part of the culture, who actively shape that culture (as we do in the way we relate to and treat celebrities), and in that sense have a very real (albeit not always a big one) impact on the world that surrounds us.

I used to like the music (my last.fm overall stats are still dominated by DD & Palmer), but since I follow her on twitter, my high notion of amanda palmer was really brought down — people used to say, the neo-goth faux-indie thing was ironic, when it turns out it really is not (oh she is struggling with her label!), and she keeps referring to relentless self-promotion and narcisissm as “doing art”, but really, #afpart? What ego requires one to show off every crayon drawing of oneself done by some pseudo-deep goth kid?

I really want to go back to the old not being able to hold a steady tone piano-torturing Amanda, with the occasional “fuck bush!” in live sessions…

In a discussion about this on another blog, someone linked to meloukhia’s old post on hipster racism:

Hipster racism involves making derogatory comments with a racial basis in an attempt to seem witty and above it all. Specifically, the idea is to sound ironic, as in “I’m allowed to say this because of course I’m not racist, so it’s funny.”

The reference to the Klan was trivializing and potentially offensive, and the tweet is kind of a confusing mess, but I think all she’s doing here is dismissing the notion of fake irony. I mean, I think the point of what she’s saying is that “ironic” product placement isn’t acceptable.

One point that seems to be widely overlooked is that the “Telephone” video that AP was dissing co-stars Beyonce, who is black.

So what AP was saying (per Reema, who I think is summarizing it quite accurately) is that “ironic” product placement is as unacceptable as a black person supporting the Klan. Or at least as taking the money from a black person’s work and giving it to the Klan.

Um, so I get the whole AFP not really saying the KKK is ironic argument, but subsequent tweets such as kind of do not fit well with that interpretation?

Also, I think maybe using an offhand reference to the Klan to make your criticism of ironic product placement is maybe a decision steeped in white privilege anyway. And if you’re actually targeting the black co-star of said product placementy video clip you should, you know, not completely invisibilise them by talking exclusively about their non-black co-star and not about them, who you are supposedly targeting according to some not-at-all-supported-by-your-actual-words interpretation.

I really liked your last blog post about her character. Both funny and accurate. I stopped being able to listen to her music a long time ago when I got a glimpse of who she is as a person. But seeing her on Good Day Australia purposefully making fun of disabled feminists was a sad confirmation.

I wanted to like her — I actually downloaded a few of her songs — but shit like this isn’t exactly winning me over. Some of the stuff that comes out of her mouth (or her pen) seems like the kinds of things a teenager would say when she’s trying to be all “shocking.” She’s in her thirties, right?

And it’s weird to have these deep feelings — one way or the other — about celebrities. Like, DEEPLY weird. If there were ever a person on the Internet who wrote as long and as intensely and as occasionally unfairly as I have written about young Amanda Palmer of the Boston Pretending To Be Statues Palmers, I would find that person’s house, and that person and I, well, we would DISCUSS.
And yet, given the amount of time she spent tweeting (and also blogging!) about Lady Gaga being SUCH A SELLOUT FOR WANTING TO BE SUCCESSFUL, MAN, and also bashing on Justin Bieber, who isn’t even old enough to drive, my sympathy for her…well, it would diminish, if I had any left. I’m not above commenting on Justin Bieber–I personally don’t like his music–but I’m not going to bash on the musical tastes of the 8-15 year old girls who keep him as a perpetual trending topic on Twitter.

I’m just going to take the time to suggest that disillusioned Amanda Palmer fans check out Ms. Neko Case. She’s talented, creative, slightly kooky, and continues to be known for her music instead of her tweets. Plus she’s has her own cartoon. Her music isn’t “omg super duper artistic gothic cabaret”, its just damn good.

I wonder how long it’ll be before we get another one of her blog posts going “I didn’t MEEEAAAAN to be ‘offensive,’ u guize, some of you are just new fans and are therefore not used to my *~edgy~* style. Also, I AM AN ARTIST!!11″

I’m pretty much done with her for obvious reasons, but this is just the disgusting, worm-laden icing on the already-moldy fail cake. I am disappointed, as an anti-racist, as a PWD, and as a feminist. Ugh.

I wouldn’t care about her one way or the other, except that Neil Gaiman is seeing her. And presumably, in some of the time he is seeing her, he could be writing more things to entertain me. Which is worse when I find the person who is keeping me from more Gaiman entertainment so annoying.